Tua Tagovailoa was insightful after a 33–8 beatdown loss to the Colts, giving a look into the complexities of a drop-back while explaining an interception on an overthrow to Tyreek Hill. There are times when the body—i.e., the footwork—wants to progress to the next read and the brain still pulls the trigger, which is what seems to have happened on a regrettable throw that opened the floodgates to a flurry of other turnovers.
But on this rare occasion, it was a platitude that followed during Tagovailoa’s press conference that proved to be the most telling. The quarterback talked about looking oneself in the mirror, both in a personal sense and a broader sense. Week 1 is always rife with often regrettable overreactions, but when the Dolphins perform this painful self-assessment, I’m curious what they see.
More than any other team, the stakes here are a little bit higher for reasons I’m about to explain. My assumption is that the Dolphins thought the team could rebuild on the fly and still ride the brilliance of its play-calling head coach and skill-position players to a respectable record while the decaying parts of the roster were overhauled. While one week is not a fair timetable to assess the viability of this plan—epsecially against a Colts team with a new quarterback and defensive coordinator—this performance was akin to showing up for the first day of school to a pop quiz, having only briefly skimmed the summer reading list.
While next Sunday’s game against the Patriots has the power to back us off the proverbial ledge—again, I’m trying to stave off the drunken fan sentiment for at least a few more days—the truth is that Miami’s identity crisis may have come to a head. We may or may not be ready to admit that the best games we saw Tagovailoa play under Mike McDaniel circa 2023 were simply going to be his best games. That the effectiveness of the Tyreek Hill–Jaylen Waddle wide receiver tandem cannot survive the rigors of a season and, given the way NFL defenses are more artfully able to play hybrid defenders who can stop the run and cover the pass, are not the weaponized force they once were. That Hill, ever the mercurial powder keg, who expressed his desire not to play on this team at the end of last season, was stripped of his captaincy before this season and was seen again expressing his frustrations on the sideline, has reached a place where his absence may be more valuable than his presence.
There is nothing worse than the person talking about the trade deadline 59 days before its arrival, or the coaching carousel, or the GM carousel to follow, but maybe it’s time to entertain the instincts that owner Stephen Ross seemed to have about the team before Tagovailoa’s and McDaniels’s arrivals. That it’s just not good enough as presently constructed and that more serious measures need to be taken well before the slog of the next offseason takes place. In short, to borrow Tagovailoa’s words, look in the mirror well before every team starts doing it at the same time.
Hill, even at 31, could still present some kind of trade value. The Dolphins have most of their late-20-year-old veterans on contracts that expire after the conclusion of next season. As for Tagovailoa, he is being backstopped by Zach Wilson, who, while equally as frustrating in the preseason as Tagovailoa was Sunday against the Colts, may warrant playing time as the weeks go on. He attempted eight passes in this game, albeit only because the score was so out of control that it made no sense to keep a starting quarterback with a deep history of injuries under center. What is GM Chris Grier—who has been in place since 2016—asking his scouts to look for as they scour the college football landscape, and is it radically different from the processes that got them here?
In essence, stop operating like a team whose plan to this point has been a success. Start acting like a team that knows this season will be far better off as a living experiment to service the 2026 season than to play out 2025 under the current vision.
By the way, we haven’t even started on the defense, which allowed scores on all seven of Indianapolis’s offensive possessions. That had not happened in an NFL game since 1978.
To complete the first Tagovailoa analogy in regard to his first pick, there may be a part of the Dolphins—the head—that wants to stay the course and keep pulling the trigger. Common sense—the footwork—is pointing in another direction. Sure, it’s ridiculous to force a hard look in the mirror after just 60 minutes of football, but perhaps that look has been long overdue.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Dolphins’ Blowout Loss Shows Overhaul May Be Overdue.